Why female friendships are work in progress

The compulsive need to label our relationships means we are never short of friends.

When I was 17, I thought I’d found true love. A classmate walked up to me one day, and confessed ‘liking’ me. We were in Class XII then and the sole purpose of our existence was to do well in the board exams next year. Amid solving tough mathematical equations and cramming complex economic theories, the new-found attention was liberating. True love back then meant something that helped you escape from textbooks. It felt good, till we received our board exam results next year where both of us had performed dismally. True love turned out to be puppy love and flew out of the window as we went our separate ways. The only decent institution that allowed me to pursue literature was an all-girls’ college, and while I had reservation about studying there, my parents were convinced otherwise.

Having studied in a co-ed institution, I seemed a misfit in this world designed for, of and by women. The conversations were about studies or eating out, and bunking a class — a rite of passage in college — was unthinkable. The classroom, despite being filled with girls my age, was a debating hotspot, as we put forth our respective views on canonised works of literature. Our disagreements extended beyond classroom to lunches and weekends. If we had our views on each other, it was based on the quality of arguments we presented.

It was also in these spaces that I forged friendships that were as endearing as they were complex. As I topped college in the first year, a friend remarked that it could be because my brother happened to be a professor in the same university. The very fact that he taught mathematics, and not English literature, was carefully omitted from her argument. My academic high was followed next year by an embarrassing blow that even surprised my professors. The same friend came up to me and suggested we spend a couple of hours at the library going through some important texts that could add to our knowledge. Was she manipulative? Envious? Empathetic? Or all of the above? I didn’t care to probe, but just went with the flow.